"Vitality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Tuckerman, lacking narrative interest, palatable platitudes, lyric lilt, but being, rather, contemplative, aloof, delicately minor and in many ways curiously modern, must have fallen on ears not attuned to it. He had none of the Bolshevik revolutionary vitality of Whitman, to thrive and grow by the opposition he created. He could have aroused no opposition. It would have been his happy fate to find men and women who could appreciate his delicate observation of nature, his ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... France, to-day, poetry is so living and vigorous a thing, that so many metrical experiments come from there. Only a vigorous tree has the vitality to put forth new branches. The poet with originality and power is always seeking to give his readers the same poignant feeling which he has himself. To do this he must constantly find new and striking images, delightful and unexpected forms. Take the word "daybreak", for instance. What a ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... the "Double-Marriage" start up into vitality again, at this advanced stage; or, of all men, Seckendorf, after riding 25,000 miles to kill the Double-Marriage, engaged in resuscitating it! But so it is: by endless intriguing, matchless in History or Romance, the Austrian Court had, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... dark days, and sad associations. Although Mrs. Smiley was not at all a "weakly woman," constant effort and care, and the absence of anything very flattering in her future, or inspiring in her present, wore upon her, exhausting her vitality too rapidly for perfect health, as the constantly increasing delicacy of her appearance testified. In truth, when the spring opened, she found herself so languid and depressed as to be hardly able to teach, in addition ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... facts which fairly intimate a possibility that the Indian may bear restriction as well as the negro has borne emancipation; and, like the negro, after a certain inevitable loss consequent upon a change so great and violent, adapt himself with increased vitality to new conditions. It is true that the transition, compulsory as to a great degree it must be, from a wholly barbarous condition of life, which remains to be effected for the eighty to one hundred thousand Indians still outside the practical scope of the Indian service, is likely to further reduce, ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... light told her the afternoon was waning, and then indications of darkness and another night of torture, despair filled her. Numb, hungry, her vitality at low ebb, she doubted her ability to weather it. Was she being punished, she wondered, for protesting against the life the Fates appeared to have mapped out for her? Was this futile inane end coming to her because since that day when ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... existence—and which is an animal of the simplest imaginable description. It is, in fact, a mere particle of living jelly, without defined parts of any kind—without a mouth, nerves, muscles, or distinct organs, and only manifesting its vitality to ordinary observation by thrusting out and retracting from all parts of its surface, long filamentous processes, which serve for arms and legs. Yet this amorphous particle, devoid of everything which, in the higher ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... head droops woefully. From without is heard the whistling of a happier spirit, and TWEENY draws herself up fiercely.) That's her; that's the thing what has stole his heart from me. (A stalwart youth appears at the window, so handsome and tingling with vitality that, glad to depose CRICHTON, we cry thankfully, 'The Hero at last.' But it is not the hero; it is the heroine. This splendid boy, clad in skins, is what nature has done for LADY MARY. She carries bow and arrows and a blow-pipe, and over ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie
... plainly that my bullet must have gone right through the monster's brain, probably only stunning it for the time being, and enough to give the boy time to hack off its head. For these creatures have an amount of vitality that is wonderful, and after injuries that are certain in the end to prove fatal, contrive to get back into the water and ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... The vitality in the branches of most of the species is very great, the smallest piece, as a rule, emitting roots and developing into a plant in a comparatively short time. The branches are soft, and easily broken, so that, in gathering the fruits, many pieces are broken off and cast aside; ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... sound asleep with his head pillowed on one end of the apparently well-killed and harmless bone. Yet as often as not, when he would wake, perhaps a quarter of an hour later, this same bone would once more betray its desperate and treacherous vitality by means of an attempt at escape. So that even in the very moment of waking the dauntless Jan would be obliged to growl fiercely and plunge straightway into ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... of organizing these thousands of St. Louis women would require not only vision but time and energy. Hannah's return meant being engulfed in the vast roar made by rows of throbbing, whirring machines, into one of which she sewed her vitality at dizzy speed ten hours a day. Vision she had, but training, ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... vitality began to ebb. He was ageing, and imagination slackened its grip. And then, just as he had begun to contemplate the possibility of abandoning the whole adventure and returning home, he was jerked back to boyhood again by ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... the soldiers firing at longer distances now the prospect of many more immediate chances was small. The champion marksmen ran for the balcony again, and the last victims dropped to their rifles. And soon was apparent the astonishing vitality of the Arab race. The wounded, who were not mortally stricken, were seen crawling and dragging themselves to cover in all directions. Had they but got the order, how delighted would the soldiers have been to quit the zereba, ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... spirit which animates its institutions; the new ideas and principles, of which it is the representative; these every patriot must wish to behold reflected from the broad mirror of a comprehensive and soul-animating literature. The true vitality of a nation is not seen in the triumphs of its industry, the extent of its conquests, or the reach of its empire; but in its intellectual dominion. Posterity passes over statistical tables of trade and population, to search for the records of the mind and heart. It is of little moment how many ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... African are possessed of as great vitality in their line as the African people. The white ant was imported accidentally into St. Helena from the coast of Guinea, and has committed such ravages in the town of St. James, that numerous people have been ruined, and the governor calls out for aid against them. In other so-called ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... more worldly friends. It is the first great work in any modern speech. It is in very truth the recognition of a new world of men, a new and more practical set of merchant intellects which, with their growing and vigorous vitality, were to supersede ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... has stood, endured and done business for almost two thousand years," he answered quietly. "It is in some ways all you say of it, but it has at least proved its vitality. Why seek to found a new organization with a new head and a new scheme of immortality if you recognize this scheme as good? The place to reorganize a business is from the inside, not the outside. These people must get their vision now. Will ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... difficulties. The isolated tissue, for example, is subject to unknown changes inseparable from the rapid approach of death. Plants, however, offer a great advantage in this respect, for they maintain their vitality unimpaired during a very great length ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... and energy of the people. Everything I know about history, every bit of experience and observation that has contributed to my thought, has confirmed me in the conviction that the real wisdom of human life is compounded out of the experiences of ordinary men. The utility, the vitality, the fruitage of life does not come from the top to the bottom; it comes, like the natural growth of a great tree, from the soil, up through the trunk into the branches to the foliage and the fruit. The great struggling unknown masses of the men who are at the base ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... this subject, said: "The lives of the British soldiers in India are very tedious and trying, especially during the hot summers, which, in the greater part of the empire, last for several months. The climate is enervating and is apt to reduce moral as well as physical vitality. There are few diversions. The native quarters of the large cities are dreadful places, especially for young foreigners. I cannot conceive of worse, from both a sanitary and a moral point of view. But they have ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... is founded in the precept, know thyself. Poetry, like happiness, is in the human heart. Its inspiration is of that which is in man, and it will never fail because there are changes in costume and grouping. What is the vitality of the Iliad? Character; nothing else. All the rest is only read out of antiquarianism or of affectation. Why is Shakespeare the greatest of poets? Because he was one of the greatest of philosophers. We reason ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Pickwick's room, and the proprietor would tell us everything. A most quaint debate arose," says Mr. FitzGerald, "on Mr. Pickwick's stay at the hotel. The host pronounced EX CATHEDRA and without hesitation about the matter. . . . The power and vitality of the Pickwickian legend are extraordinary indeed; all day long we found people bewildered, as it were, by this faith, mixing up the author and ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... me that we were rather a puny folk, but at Norwich, with its chapels and pastors and people, I saw another sight. There was the Rev. John Alexander, with an overflowing audience on the Sunday and an active vitality all the week, now dining at the palace with the Bishop or breakfasting at Earlham with the Gurneys, now meeting on terms of equality the literati of the place (at that time Mrs. Opie was still living near the castle, and Mr. Wilkins was writing his life ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... butterfly, like a leaf, like any swift, volatile, shifting, shimmering thing. She seemed as agile as a cat, as tireless as a monkey, as free as a bird. Suddenly the dance that was all contradiction ended in a final contradiction. At the moment when her exuberance seemed keenest, her vitality fiercest, her action most animated, when her eyes were shining their brightest, her lips smiling their sweetest, and her castanets clicking their loudest, she suddenly became rigid, with arms extended, like one struck motionless by a catalepsy, her face robbed of all expression, ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Hamlet's nerves. Not that anything derogatory to Hamlet or the Birds is intended; but the value of such works is not enhanced by forcing them into contrast with other works which cover deeper and wider nexus of aesthetic and spiritual material. It is the very subtlety of the vitality of such works as Antony and Cleopatra and Lysistrata that makes it so easy to undervalue them, to see only a phallic play and political pamphlet in one, only a chronicle play in a grandiose ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... Ebbing vitality and the increased urgency of the problem drove him to a desperate resource. A pregnant female came within the extreme range of his perception. An embryo mind might serve! The mind, as yet unsullied, sleeping, a blank page untouched by the world, was open to ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... maid wandering about there when the other servants were in bed. Bunner, I knew, was a deep sleeper. Mrs. Manderson, I had gathered from things I had heard her say, was usually asleep by eleven; I had thought it possible that her gift of sleep had helped her to retain all her beauty and vitality in spite of a marriage which we all knew was an unhappy one. Still, it was uneasy work mounting the stairs and holding myself ready to retreat to the library again at the least sound from above. But ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... quite unconsciously to herself, was preparing a liquidation in full of all spiritual obligations. For even then, in obscure nooks and corners, the Scottish ballads were growing up, quite uncontrolled by critical rules, rude in structure and expression, yet, at the same time, full of vitality, retaining in all their keenness the mirth of rustic festivals, and the piteousness of domestic tragedies. The stormy feudal time out of which they arose crumbled by process of gradual decay, but they remained, made brighter by each succeeding summer, like the wildflowers ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... were overwhelmed by stronger races, whose religions and beliefs superseded the vestiges of the Ancient Doctrine. The Egyptians held that there was "Ka," the divine spirit in man; "Ab," the intellect or will; "Hati," the vitality; "Tet," the astral body; "Sahu," the etheric double; and "Xa," the physical body (some authorities forming a slightly different arrangement), which correspond to the various "bodies of man" as recognized by ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... secure land and tools, own them in common so that no one could profit from exclusive ownership, and produce by common labor the food and clothing necessary for their support. For a time this movement attracted wide interest, but it had little vitality. Nearly all the colonies failed. Selfishness and indolence usually disrupted the ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... deep impression on my father. He grew seriously pensive, fell into hypochondria, and finally became fully convinced that his brush had served as a tool of the Devil; and that a portion of the usurer's vitality had actually passed into the portrait, and was now troubling people, inspiring diabolical excitement, beguiling painters from the true path, producing the fearful torments of envy, and so forth. Three catastrophes which occurred afterwards, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... from tonal to tonal climax, and out of the slow movement, which is like a tourniquet twisting the heart into the spirited allegro molto vivace, it was as if beneath Leon Kantor's fingers the strings were living vein-cords, youth, vitality, and the very foam ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... to dismiss the wetting she had got, took off her turn-down, speckly, straw hat, put on an apron, and rolled up her sleeves. Her arms were full and firm and red; the whole of her was full and firm. From her rosy cheeks to her stout ankles she was superabundant with vitality, the strangest contrast to her shadowy, thin old grandfather. About the preparation of her father's tea she moved with a sort of brooding stolidity, out of which would suddenly gleam a twinkle of rogue-sweetness, as when she stopped to stroke the little cat or to tickle the back of her grandfather's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... he had an uncommon amount of energy, vitality, a force of some kind or other. Whatever he undertook he followed with a full vigorous sweep; he was successful in convincing a large proportion of the people with whom he dealt that their ends were the same as his; and here, as well, chance, fate, had been with Lee—no ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Nature stores every corner and by-place of the system, thereby anticipating the scarcity of food, has been exhausted, and the sudden and severe changes in the weather which occur at this season make unusual demands upon their vitality. No doubt many of the earlier birds die from starvation and exposure at this season. Among a troop of Canada sparrows which I came upon one March day, all of them evidently much reduced, one was so feeble that I ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... extent, the effect upon character which they should have made it their paramount duty to produce. Nevertheless, whenever the intellect of the people is appealed to by those who know its past, a recuperative power is manifested which shows that its vitality has not been irredeemably impaired. It is because I believe that, on the whole, a right appeal has been made by the Gaelic League that I have borne testimony ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... surface there are two small transverse slits, from the anterior one of which a funnel-shaped and highly irritable mouth can be protruded. For some time after the rest of the animal was completely dead from the effects of salt water or any other cause, this organ still retained its vitality. ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... ground at the proper season, he thenceforth leaves it to itself. He sleeps by night, and attends to other affairs by day, often looking to it indeed, and oftener thinking of it, but never touching it till harvest. By its own vitality it grows secretly, gradually until it arrives at maturity. Man interferes only at the beginning and at the end; in spring he sows, and in autumn he reaps, but throughout the interval between these extremes he lets ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... copious, are over. The Yellow-birds, the Red-birds, the original Broadway, the Fourth avenue, the Knickerbocker, and a dozen others of twenty or thirty years ago, are all gone. And the men specially identified with them, and giving vitality and meaning to them—the drivers—a strange, natural, quick-eyed and wondrous race—(not only Rabelais and Cervantes would have gloated upon them, but Homer and Shakspere would)—how well I remember ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... hope like that vague and unformulated. But he marvelled, still without understanding, at the strange obstinate idea which seemed almost to exalt Quisante above the ordinary lot of mortals, to see in him a force so living that it could not perish, a vitality so intense that death could lay no hand on it. He glanced at her as he crossed the room to the piano; she sat now with the telegram in her hands and her eyes fixed on the floor in front of her. It needed ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... living of inanimate things. Servants sometimes say "she" of a clock, but every one gives a gender to vessels. And we need not be surprised, therefore, to find a mode of dealing which has shown such extraordinary vitality in the criminal law applied with even more striking thoroughness in the Admiralty. It is only by supposing [27] the ship to have been treated as if endowed with personality, that the arbitrary seeming peculiarities of the maritime law can be made intelligible, and on that ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... merely the instrument of a majority of the legislature, and what recourse is there left to the people but 'Boulangism'? 'Boulangism' is the instinctive, more or less deliberate and articulate, outcry of a people living under constitutional forms, but conscious that, by some hocus-pocus, the vitality has been taken out of those forms. It is the expression of the general sense of insecurity. In a country situated as France now is, it is natural that this inarticulate outcry should merge itself at first into a clamour for the revision of a Constitution ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... wondered, too, if she was right, when she saw his fox-terrier watching him, ever watching him with his big brown eyes as he buoyantly worked, and saw him stoop to pat its head. Or was this, after all, mere animalism, mere superficial vitality, love of health and being? She shuddered, and shut her eyes, for it came home to her that to him she was just such a being of health, vitality and comeliness, on a little higher plane. She put the thought from her, but it had had its birth, and it would not down. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... true also that the feeble-minded family is more likely to renew its vitality by the mixing in of new, normal blood in the country than in the city. Illegitimacy holds in the problem of rural feeble-mindedness the same position that prostitution occupies in urban amentia. The attractive feeble-minded girl—and of course many of these girls ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... is remarkably constant there are certain factors that influence it in one direction or the other. Healing is more rapid when the edges are in contact, when there is a minimum amount of blood-clot between them, when the patient is in normal health and the vitality of the tissues has not been impaired. Wounds heal slightly more quickly in the young than in the old, although the difference is so small that it can only be demonstrated ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... policemen, aldermen, and other important looking persons bore witness. He hailed by name Italians, Greeks, Belgians, Syrians, and "French"; he hailed Janet, too, with respectful cheerfulness, taking off his hat. He possessed the rare, warm vitality that is irresistible. A native of Hampton, still in his thirties, his sharp little nose and twinkling blue eyes proclaimed the wisdom that is born and not made; his stiff hair had a twist like the bristles in the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... listened to her implacable enemy's speech with ever-increasing terror. Numbed with physical pain, she yet had sufficient mental vitality in her to realize the full horror of this terrible "either—or" he was once more putting before her; "either—or" ten thousand times more appalling and horrible, that the one he had suggested to her that fatal night ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... only expressing general views," he hurriedly assured her, and again under her level scrutiny, he felt the contrast between her vibrant vitality and his own autumnal maturity. But Conscience went steadily on in the unmistakable manner of one who has no intention ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... the Croen captive, as they fear death! The Croens have fought to destroy their power for centuries, on many planets in our area of space. Cyane is one of their greatest. She is a scientist of vast wisdom, and one who has developed a technique of increasing the vitality of life within herself, as well as in anyone she chooses to favor. You could well win from her such gifts, if you should release her. It is one reason I wish to release her, in order to win from her that secret of long life which she holds. The Croens are masters of warfare and she would be able, ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... some years older than her husband,—how many we need not inquire too curiously,—but in vitality she had long passed the prime in which he was still flourishing. She had borne him five children, and cried her eyes hollow over the graves of three of them. Household cares had dragged upon her; the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... could not be coaxed to its feet again, he picked up the bundle of rugs and plowed forward blindly, soul and body racked, but teeth still set fast with the primal instinct never to give up. The intense cold of the air, thick with gray sifted ice, searched the warmth from his body and sapped his vitality. His numbed legs doubled under him like springs. He was down and up again a dozen times, but always the call of life drove him on, dragging his helpless burden ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... difficulty of conceiving moral as distinct from intellectual insanity, fully admits as a clinical fact the form of mental disease for which Prichard contended, and had he been living he would doubtless have claimed this article as a striking proof of the vitality of his opinions. ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... hurting thus the two vital spots of poetry. Many of the stanzas for music make an unlucky repeating pattern with the poor variety that a repeating wall-paper does not attempt. And yet Campion began again and again with the onset of a true poet. Take, for example, the poem beginning with the vitality of this line, "touching in ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... victory, marched into Yamato, and set fire to the palace there. Go-Murakami escaped to Kanao, and presently the Nitta family in the east and the Kitabatake in the west showed such activity that the Southern cause recovered its vitality, a turn of events largely promoted by dissensions in the Northern camp and by the consequent return of Moronao's forces to Kyoto. It is necessary, therefore, to direct our eyes for a moment to the course of affairs on the side of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... controlled the convention, voting down the "Middle-of-the-Road" group that adhered to independence. Bryan was nominated, although Sewall was rejected for Thomas E. Watson, of Georgia. The organization of the People's Party continued after 1896, but its vitality was gone forever. ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... thing has not life enough in it to keep it sweet;' Johnson, 'The creature possesses not vitality sufficient to preserve it from putrefaction.'"—MATT. HARRISON, on the English Language, p. 102. ANALYSIS.—What is the general sense of this passage? and what, the chain of connexion between the words Swift and putrefaction? The period ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of want aggravating all other maladies, the long suffering of a persistent vitality amidst pain and which refuses to succumb, the final death-rattle in a garret ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the decks of her different compartments, but one of whom occasionally moved—slowly. He understood that. For weeks now the Peary had lain captive, and her air had passed beyond the aid of rectifiers. Tortured, those survivors inside were, constantly struggling for life, with vitality ever sinking lower. Some might already be dead. But at least he could try to ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... struck him hard, he was so terribly worried for my sake, you know. Then he took a little cold which we didn't think anything about, and suddenly, before we realized it, he was down with double pneumonia from which he never rallied. His vitality seemed to be gone. After he died, the papers said beautiful things about his bravery and courage and Christianity, and people tried to be nice, but when it was all over there were still people who looked at me curiously when I passed, ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... lady critics did not favor certain features of the original, and one of them, indeed, referred to the evil denounced by M. Zola as a mere evil of the hour, whereas it has been growing and spreading for half a century, gradually sapping all the vitality of France. But beside that evil, beside the downfall of the families it attacks, M. Zola portrays the triumph of rectitude, the triumph which follows faith in the powers of life, and observance of the ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... this phenomenon are too technical to receive adequate treatment here. Certainly the Bank Crisis of February of 1797 was not due to the exhaustion of the nation; for the revenue testified to its abounding vitality. The Permanent Taxes maintained nearly the high level reached in the prosperous year of peace, 1792, and the figures for British Imports and Exports told the same tale, but the sums of money borrowed in the years 1796, 1797 ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... There were livid marks under his eyes. For a moment he had lost all his vitality, he was like ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... very great amount of vitality in the human frame, and where the wear and tear of active labour does not exist, man can live for a long period almost without solid food, especially if there be a plentiful supply of ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... it. Addison is a very interesting fellow to a doctor, and the fact of his strong friendship with you has made him more interesting even than he would otherwise have been. His physique is tremendous. He has a quite unusual vitality, and stronger passions by far than most Englishmen. I confess that my knowledge of human nature led me to foresee a very troubled and too vehement future for him. My anticipation being utterly falsified led me naturally to look round for the reason of its falsification. I very soon found that ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Continental town to another, blackballed by good clubs, cold-shouldered even by the Teresitas, cut off from society by his limited means and the stories his wife's friends would spread. He ground his teeth when he thought of Betty. Her splendid vitality had done something to life for him—had given it savour. When he had come upon her in the avenue his blood had stirred, even though it had been maliciously, and there had been spice in his very resentment of her presence. And she would go away. He would not be ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... up, and a little vitality came back to her face; for a moment she almost looked as she had looked in ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... a life-blow to some Who, till they died, did not alive become; Who, had they lived, had died, but when They died, vitality begun." ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... him something that instantly commanded the confidence of rough men,—the look of self-sufficiency and superior capability always to be found in connection with immense will power. His sixty years of exposure, hardship, and danger seemed to have but toughened his physique and strengthened his vitality. Out of his small hazel eyes gleamed a light ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... of my life, 'The Christian,'" said the gifted novelist to a reporter in speaking of his methods, "I had endowed the characters of Golly and John Gale with such superhuman vitality and absolute reality that—as is well known in the experience of great writers—they became thinking beings, and actually criticised my work, and even INTERFERED and REBELLED to the point of altering my climax and the end!" The present edition gives that ending, ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... of dangerous heating, are turned to useful account, so that the point where radiation exceeds production is soon reached, and provided the machines are not speeded beyond the proper limit, they may be run continuously without the slightest indication of lost vitality. I need scarcely remind you that this is a most important feature, and by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 315, January 14, 1882 • Various
... the neighborhood, or some traveller in whom her alert maternal eye detected a possible suitor for Victorine's hand. Victorine herself was not so fastidious. She was young, handsome, overflowing with vitality, and with no more conscience or delicacy than her mother had had before her. If the whole truth had been known concerning the last four years of her life in the convent, it would have considerably astonished those good Catholics, ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... memory of the least of these enchantments brought infinite peace to his soul. The inhabitant of Paris has one great blessing, which he does not take into account until he suffers from its loss—one great half of his existence is filled up without the least trouble to himself. The all-potent vitality which ceaselessly envelops him takes away from him in a vast degree the exertion of amusing himself. The roar of the city, rising like a great bass around him, fills up the gaps in his thoughts, and never leaves ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... a moment at the strong, noble outlines of the drawing and see how finely modelled is the figure. So carefully did Millet study this work that he first modelled the figure in clay that he might give it more vitality in the painting. This Man with the Hoe seems indeed not a painted figure, but a real living, breathing human being, whom we can touch and find of solid flesh ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... kind of retreat from the enemy, a concession to difficulty. The enemy was no particular person and no particular body of persons: not his mother; not Mr. Carteret, who, as he heard from the doctor at Beauclere, lingered on, sinking and sinking till his vitality appeared to have the vertical depth of a gold-mine; not his pacified constituents, who had found a healthy diversion in returning another Liberal wholly without Mrs. Dallow's aid (she had not participated even to the extent of a responsive telegram in the election); ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... the time, was nineteen years of age. She was neither handsome nor distinguished, plain indeed, although her mild, good-natured eyes had in their light a quality of vitality and interest that gave her personality; her figure was thick and square—she would be probably stout one day. She moved like a man. Behind the mildness of her eyes there was much character and resolve in her ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... and there it held pools of water ankle-deep. The stride of the marching men appeared short and dragging, without swing or rhythm. It was weary, yet full of the latent power of youth, of unused vitality. Stern, clean-cut, youthful faces were set northward, unchanging in the shadowy, pale gleams of the night. These faces lifted intensely whenever a strange, muffled, deep-toned roar rolled out of the murky north. The night looked stormy, but that rumble was not thunder. Fifty ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... again the unbearable pathos of them smote her. The poor Aunties. She was a brute to hurt them. She still thought of them as Auntie Louie, Auntie Emmy, Auntie Edie. It seemed kinder; for thus she bestowed upon them a colour and vitality that, but for her and for her children, they would not have had. They were helpless, tiresome, utterly inefficient. In all their lives they had never done anything vigorous or memorable. They were doomed to go out before her children; when they were ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... It is only then that the standard of development is reached that is most compatible with the successful bearing of the grave responsibilities of wifehood and motherhood. The too early exercise of the reproductive functions leads to increased suffering on the part of the mother, depresses her vitality, and increases her liability to disease. Statistics show that the mortality is very much greater where girls marry under twenty ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... vines was very light because continual rains prevented the pollenization of the flowers. Such failures, however, do not always come from a want of pollen but may result from an over or irregular supply of water either at the root or in the air, imperfectly balanced food supply, a sapping of the vitality of the plants when young, or from other causes. Insects rarely visit tomato flowers and are seldom the ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... 'Equality' was a task too great for the physical strength and vitality of its author. His health, never robust, gave way completely, and the book was finished by an indomitable and inflexible dominion of the powerful mind over the failing body which was nothing short of heroic. Consumption, that common New England inheritance, developed suddenly, ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... various forms of cultivation of the soil only by the standard of their money value, but also by that of their ideal worth. The fact that our soil is cultivated in so many various ways is one of the chief causes of our wealth of individual social organizations, and therefore of the vitality of our society itself. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... man alive could escape any one of them. It is almost a certainty that that sort of thing cannot go on forever. One or the other of them may age sufficiently to retire from the arena, as did Murmex Frugi, safe and unscarred, as he was not. But it is far more likely, since both are full of vitality and vigor, that neither will notice the very gradual approach of age, so that they will go on fighting with eyes undimmed, muscles supple and minds quick, yet not so quick, supple and keen as now: but the preternatural powers of one will wane a bit sooner than those of the other. And sooner ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... itself, a major objective for the officer corps, since our public has little studious interest in military affairs, tends ever to discount the vitality of the military role in the progress and prosperity of the nation and regards the security problem as one of the less pleasant and abnormal burdens ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... man indeed outgrow affections as his mind ripens? Do the early and tender sympathies become a part of his intellectual perceptions, to be appreciated and reasoned upon as one reasons about truths of science? Is their vitality necessarily young? Is there the same ripe, joyous burst of the heart at the recollection of later friendships, which belonged to those of boyhood; and are not the later ones more the suggestions of judgment, and less the absolute conditions of the ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... to sound the savage voice of torrents falling over cliffs, rapids rising and surging in deep gorges. The wetness and the cold sapped Molly's vitality. She shivered, her flesh seemed sodden, her hands and wrists began to puff and she saw their flesh was purple in the fading light. She rode with hands on the saddle horn, her head bowed, water streaming from the rim of her Stetson, the thud of the rain on her tired shoulders heavy ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... of vitality given to proceedings came from speech of George Cave. Member for Kingston does not frequently interpose in debate. Long intervals of silence give him opportunity of garnering something worth saying, a rule of Parliamentary life that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... powerful falsehoods that stand in the way of every form of progress, I may be tempted to publish a cheap edition of my work on Greek Philosophy and Logic. It is not in the least presumptuous to lay hands upon this venerable illusion, and show that it has not even the vitality of a ghost. It is but a simulacrum or mirage, and it is but necessary to approach it fearlessly, and walk through it, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... And shade, as they lay prone, or stretched supine Beneath their favorite tree, with dreamy eyes And Argo-fandes voyaging the skies. "Tales of the Ocean" was the name of one Old dog's-eared book that was surpassed by none Of all the glorious list.—Its back was gone, But its vitality went bravely on In such delicious tales of land and sea As may not ever perish utterly. Of still more dubious caste, "Jack Sheppard" drew Full admiration; and "Dick Turpin," too. And, painful as ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... to Dolly and Robin. Dolly's splendid vitality has stood her in good stead during the last twenty-four hours, and this, combined with the present flood-tide of joyous relief, made it hard to believe that she had spent a day and a night of labour and anxiety. She was much more ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... of the activities of the school in which the educator and the physician join hands to insure for each child such conditions of health and vitality as will best enable him to take full advantage of the free education offered by the state. Its object is to better health conditions among school children, safeguard them from disease, and render them healthier, happier, and more ...
— Health Work in the Public Schools • Leonard P. Ayres and May Ayres
... the spiritual vitality that has given these words the power to rejuvenate India century after century." Another hour disappeared in silence. The master dismissed the students, ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... the American Theatre. It revealed the fact that at last an American playwright had written a drama comparable with the very best European models, scintillating with clear, cold brilliancy, whose dialogue carried with it an exceptional literary style. It was a play that showed a vitality which will serve to keep it alive for many generations, which will make it welcome, however often it is revived; for there is a universal import to its satire which raises it above the local, social condition it purports to portray. And though there is nothing of an ideal ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... what a sermon astronomy preaches as to the substantial power of invisible things. If the visible universe is so stupendous, what shall we think of the unseen force and vitality in whose arms all its splendors rest? It is no gigantic Atlas, as the Greeks fancied, that upholds the celestial sphere; all the constellations are kept from falling by an impalpable energy that uses no muscles and no masonry. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the world for the first time as an authoress, in 'Goethe's Correspondence with a Child.' The dithyrambic exaltation, the unrestrained but beautiful enthusiasm of the book came like an electric shock. Into an atmosphere of spiritual stagnation, these letters brought a fresh access of vitality and hope. Bettina's old friendly relations with Goethe had been resumed later in life, and in a letter written to her niece she gives a charming account of the visit to the poet in 1824, which proved to be her last. This letter first saw the light ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... gay vitality of that other summer when every day had been an exquisite intaglio of laughter. There were times when unreasonably he even missed Adam. How the nights in contrast had sharpened the joy of his days! And he hated the village ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... sea-breeze gave me new sensations of life; and, but for one circumstance, I should have felt all the enjoyment of that most delightful of all contrasts—between the languor of a sick bed, and the renewed pouring of vitality through the frame. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... the hour that Laurier spoke this man continued to lean over the table so as to catch a view of his fascinating face. He interested me almost as much as did the speaker. I had never sat beside such an irrepressible vitality. Like a bird to a succession of swinging boughs, he hung upon the golden utterances of his old chieftain and political mentor concerning a subject so poignantly dear to the experiences of one and the ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... of all moral authority by persistent efforts to procure their indirect repeal through contradictory enactments. They had been practically abrogated by the legislation attending the organization of Utah, New Mexico, and Washington. If any vitality remained in them it would have been taken away, in effect, by the new Territorial acts in the form originally proposed to the Senate at the first session of the last Congress. It was manly and ingenuous, as well as patriotic and just, to do this directly and ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... from the earliest opening of youth to the entrance of manhood, had chiefly been occupied within the precincts of his own Principality in quelling the spirit of rebellion which had burst forth there with great fury, and had been protracted with a vitality almost incredible, is from this date to be viewed and examined under a totally different combination of circumstances. Early in the year 1409 he was appointed Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler |
